Tisch Art & Public Policy and The Latinx Project host a poetry reading and conversation with three renowned Afro-Latina poets and scholars: Dr. Raina J. León, Jasminne Mendez, and Yesenia Montilla. Join us as they share poems and stories that celebrate what it means to be Black, Latinx, and Womxn. We will be in a dialogue with the poets as they discuss how the intersections of these identities inform their lives and work. The poets will be introduced by Solena Ornelas and Tarisse Iriarte following a welcome by Uraoyán Noel, the conversation will then be facilitated by Pato Hebert.
Registration is required. RSVP via eventbrite.
**Please join us before at 4 p.m. for an artist-led tour of Allow Me to Gather Myself by Mildred Beltré on the 4th floor and stay for the Afro-Latinas Poetry event at 6 p.m. ** RSVP here for tour
Co-sponsored with The Department of Art & Public Policy, Tisch School of the Arts, The Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, and Some Contemporary Poetries, NYU Dept. of English and The Center for Research & Study, Tisch School of the Arts
Participants
Raina J. León
is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She is the author of Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, sombra : (dis)locate, and the chapbooks, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She publishes across forms in visual art, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and scholarly work.
Black god mother this body - Raina J. León’s book explores the divine, the ancestrally aligned, the natural rhythmed black woman in her embodied reality, particularly as mother. this is a healing meditation, an extended song, an experimentation in augmenting reality that constantly threatens black mothers and children. León invites defiant and collective flourishing. this book integrates biomimicry, technology, afrofuturist practices and afrosurrealist revelations. it boldly encounters the horrors of (digital) lynchings in the murders of black and brown peoples in spirit and in body while also uplifting new radical dreams.
Jasminne Mendez
is a Dominican-American poet, playwright, educator and award-winning author. Mendez has had poetry and essays published in numerous journals and anthologies and she is the author of several books for children and adults including Island of Dreams which won an International Latino Book Award in 2015. She is a faculty member with the Goddard College MFA Creative Writing Program and she lives in Houston, TX.
City Without Altar - is a poetry collection and play in verse that explores what it means to live, love, heal and experience violence as a Black person in the world. The titular play in verse that sits at the center of the book seeks to amplify the voices and experiences of victims, survivors and living ancestors of the 1937 Haitian Massacre that occurred along the Dominican/Haitian border during the Trujillo Era. Ultimately, this book is a meditation on being/feeling “blacked out” by the archive, on the world stage and in one’s daily life.
Yesenia Montilla
is an Afro-Latina poet & a daughter of immigrants. She received her MFA from Drew University in Poetry & Poetry in translation. She is CantoMundo graduate fellow and a 2020 NYFA fellow. Her work has been published in Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast and in Best of American Poetry 2021 and forthcoming in Best of American Poetry 2022. Her first collection The Pink Box is published by Willow Books & was long-listed for a PEN award.
Muse Found in a Colonized Body -In the book’s eponymous poem, Yesenia Montilla writes, “How do you not love yourself when you / constantly survive your undoing just by being precious?” Muse Found in a Colonized Body answers this rhetorical question by populating itself with poems that range far and wide in content — observing pop culture, interrogating history, resisting contemporary injustice — but that share the spinal cord of unflinching love. The vertebral odes of this collection at turns uplift desire, affirm life, celebrate protest, and condemn the violent greed of imperial usurpation that has produced the U.S. as we know it.
Solena Orlenas
is an Afro Latina classically trained upright bass player, carries a profound passion for dismantling the barriers that hinder accessibility to music and art for marginalized communities. She recently graduated from Dominican University of California with a double major in political science and music, and she now embarks on her graduate studies in Arts Politics at NYU, channeling her talents and insights to challenge institutional racism and advocate for inclusivity within creative spheres.
Tarisse Iriarte
is an independent curator and arts activist from Brooklyn, New York. with Afro Caribbean Roots in Cuba and Puerto Rico. She is simply known as “Tee” in her beloved Communities. Tee is what happens when a human loves art and community. She is a proud Afro Puerto Rican working diligently on the global liberation of her people across the diaspora through socially-engaged art. Tee curates exhibits that contextualize the intersections of diasporan arts across a socio-political landscape and works tirelessly to sow seeds rooted in liberatory praxis alongside a global community of artists, movement workers and radical thinkers. Tee is currently the Curator at Large for EnFoco INC. She serves on the advisory board for ARTE (Art Resistance Through Education) and is a member of NALAC (National Association of Latino Arts & Culture) AAMC (Association of Art Museum Curators) and the Katal Center for Health Equity and Justice
Pato Herbert
is a visual artist, educator and organizer. He joined Tisch School of the Art’s Department of Art & Public Policy in 2012, where he has served as Chair since 2020. His students have twice nominated him for the David Payne-Carter Excellence in Teaching Award. In 2008 he received the Excellence in Photographic Teaching Award from Center in Santa Fe. He has lectured, exhibited and led workshops at universities around the United States as well as in Abu Dhabi, Buenos Aires, Florence, Melbourne, Mexico City and Shanghai.